A couple of thousand crazed devotees of all things Microsoft descended on this small hamlet in the Nevada dessert yesterday. MIX has always been a little confused in its focus. About half of the attendees are Microsofties and the rest are civilians. Some to the time MIX thinks its devoted to Web 2.0, HTML5 and an Open Web. The rest of the time its Silverlight and Microsoft Phone 7. Needless to say this leads to some confusion of content and level of presentation. As George Harrison sang: Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down. And the less said about the SQL Azure alleged “party” at the oh so trendy Eye Candy Lounge the better. One thing MIX is not is it is not QCON.

On a positive note, Kitterman and Batum’s presentation on the (emerging) W3C Web sockets standard was both technical and informative. Go, web sockets go. We need you. Jason Weber’s presentation “50 Performance Tricks to Make your HTML5 Web Sites Faster” was excellent. Although the title should have been: 50 Performance Tips to Make Web Sites Faster”, this is a slide deck to be seen by anyone interested in higher performance in their web sites. Solid A grade presentation. Let’s see how Wednesday goes.